In the Critics section of this week’s New Statesman, Richard Mabey, in his final seasonal diary (autumn), considers how to evaluate the significance of wildlife. “The problem is that we don’t have an agreed alternative scale for the 'value of species,'” Mabey writes. “That clunking, portmanteau term 'biodiversity' doesn’t help. Like 'natural capital' it’s an intruder from corporate-speak.”
In Books, NS editor Jason Cowley reviews Janan Ganesh’s biography George Osborne: The Austerity Chancellor. “Who is this book for?” asks Cowley. “Is it for the general reader interested in Westminster politics or Janan Ganesh’s friends in journalism and those aides and special advisers who work for George Osborne...?” Elsewhere, Tom Wolfe’s latest novel Back To Blood is reviewed by Leo Robson. “The new novel is broadly concerned with the limits of what the US is willing to assimilate and accept,” Robson writes.
Also in Books: writer and literary critic Sarah Churchwell reviews A M Homes’ novel May We Be Forgiven (a “comic epic of modern America”); Yo Zushi looks at David Byrne’s How Music Works (“a partly autobiographical trawl through music history and theory that is essential that is essential reading for anyone with even a passing interest in the subject”); and William Skidelsky reviews Steven Poole’s You Aren’t What You Eat: Fed Up With Gastroculture (“the author’s two main charges in this polemic are indeed that, on one hand, “foodists” talk a lot of rubbish and, on the other, that an overweening interest in food is a new, specifically western type of deviance”).
In his “Personal Story”, Hunter Davies makes a confession about his 1968 Beatles biography and reveals the origin of the phrase “I am the eggman.”
Elsewhere in the Critics: Rachel Cooke is won over by new US TV show Girls; Antonia Quirke on Simon Callow and Classic FM’s Tasting Notes; and Alexandra Coghlan reviews Decasia.
PLUS: Will Self’s Real Meals, Nina Caplan on Drink, Down and Out by Nicholas Lezard, and Ed Smith’s Left Field.